Cities of Ghosts
by fowl68
Summary: And as soon as they're gone, the man resets the board and plays against no one once more. And most every time, he loses. Post-Apocalyptic


**Disclaimer:** Don't own anything.

**Author's Note:** Sorry it's been a while since I wrote anything for _Naruto_. Been distracted by my current reobsession with Tales of Symphonia. As for The Silver Lining, I am still working on it. It's just that I seem to have run into a few stops in it, but it is still going. I'm also working on a book with my brother as well as a few original stories, so that's been distracting me as well.

Going to the Bahamas tomorrow and I thought I'd get this done before I go. Also, can't wait for the Psych season premiere tonight and I saw White Collar last night. I have sworn to myself to keep up with those and Leverage this time around.

I've always liked the thought of what would the others do if they had to flee Konoha, if they had to lead ordinary lives away from everything. And I wanted to try and not use any names, so let's see how that goes. So, here's my snippets of their lives.

-/-/

"_Long before the Roussi army marched into Afghanistan, long before villages were burned and schools destroyed, long before mines were planted like seeds of death and children buried in rock-piled graves, Kabul had become a city of ghosts for me. A city of hare-lipped ghosts._

_America was different. America was a river, roaring along, unmindful of the past. I could wade into this river, let my sins drown to the bottom, let the waters carry me someplace far. Someplace with no ghosts, no memories and no sins. _

_If for nothing else, for that, I embraced America."—Amir __**(The Kite Runner)**_

-/-/

Nobody knows the old man_ (They're all assuming he's an old man. No one's ever seen what he looks like, what with the scarf constantly around his cheeks and he's got silver hair)_ that's always sitting at that same bench.

The kids have all gone up to him and talked. He doesn't ever send them away _(Except for one day a year, when he doesn't talk at all or look at anyone. His eyes—they're mismatched and odd—grow dark) _but sits there and listens. Sometimes, very rarely, he'll chuckle a little, or comment on the children's words. His comments never make any sense, but the children like the sound of his voice, so they don't mind when he starts talking to people they've never heard of and apologizing for things they've never seen.

He told them a story once. It was full of adventure and intrigue, but the end was so terribly sad that they had to get away from that terribly haunted look in his eyes. _(Mismatched eyes. One is dark gray and tired, and the other, the few times his hair isn't hiding it, is red red red. Red as the blood that gets on their knees when they fall from their bikes, as the cherries that the lady sells in the market.)_

-/-/

She touches her hands to his tattoos_ (Her hands are nothing like their hands. Hers are soft and smooth; hands of someone who'd never looked death in the eye. Their hands…their hands were smooth, sometimes. Shino's hands had long fingers and a small, white scar on the fourth knuckle of his right hand. Hinata's were delicate in shape and small in size, but had a strength to them.)_

"These are interesting." She says, tracing the tattoos' triangular edges. "Do they mean something? Is that why you got them?"

_(They were the symbol of his clan.)_

But he smiles charmingly_ (Falsely. Shino had always said that he had the charm of a river stone.)_ and says, "I was with some friends that night. It was my twenty-third birthday," _(Liar. You got those tattoos when you were seven and you remember crying a little, but Akamaru, still small and able to fit in your arms then, was right beside you)_ and there was some alcohol involved. When I woke up, they were there."

-/-/-/

They watch her with awe as the bottles twist and whirl through her hands.

"Where did you learn to juggle like that?" They'll ask.

She'll laugh as she pours them their drinks and replies, "I was in the circus growing up."

They'll never know that the young woman behind the bar, with her natural doll-like features _(She's not a doll, was never a doll. She was never that delicate and spent the first two decades of her life proving that)_ was an assassin and a shadow warrior once. They'll never know that she first learned to juggle with blades in her hands rather than bottles or rum or whiskey. That there are calluses on her palms, almost gone and worn away now with this easy life that she's settled into, that were there since she was a child. The calluses are from blades and staffs and long hours of martial arts with her boys_ (Don't think about them. Don't. They're gone now. Everyone's gone.)_.

-/-/-/-

The man is always there. In the same spot every day. Even when it rains. Especially when it rains.

He sits there in that small café, cigarette wobbling between his lips, playing shogi with no one. The girls like him. He's mysterious, they whisper, and handsome on top of it.

He's got dark brown hair pulled back into a ponytail and intelligent dark eyes. There's a thin scar, just along the line of his cheekbone, but no one who's asked him about it has ever gotten an answer. He's slender and the few times that they hear him speak, his voice is quiet and a little husky.

He always orders the same thing. An herbal tea and a few skewers of barbequed pork. Sometimes someone will get the nerve_ (He's not an intimidating man, whoever he was. But something about him—the scar, perhaps or the way he moved like a subtle predator—made people cautious.)_ to sit across from him and challenge him to a match.

They always lose.

And as soon as they're gone, the man resets the board and plays against no one once more. And most every time, he loses.

-/-/-/-/

She's a lovely young woman, truly. Intelligent too. But most of the hospital staff has learned that she doesn't date. The interns learn that slowly though.

They ask her, sometimes. Ask her why she doesn't date when she's not living with anyone, when she's not married or engaged. The young woman will smile a little _(It's a broken, sad smile that doesn't suit the woman they know, but fits the look in those bright green eyes perfectly)_ and say, "I'm promised to someone."

_(It's a promise that no one can remember now except for her. She doesn't even know what happened to them. It's a promise made over a shared coffee cake—it was the only sweet thing that they could all agree on, even if sensei had always stolen the cherry—and milkshakes.)_

"Who is it?" They ask excitedly. She'd never been engaged, as far as they knew, but then, things changed. "Who's the lucky guy?"

The smile stays on her pink lips and she'll fiddle with the bracelet, with its charms. One has a fan, the other a spiral and the last a little stick scarecrow that scratches at her sk1in sometimes. "Oh, you don't know them." She says. "But they're very special to me."

"They?" Someone echoes.

She says that she can't explain it, that's it's complicated. _(It's simple and easy, really. Her memory wants to say that things were always like that between her and her boys, but she knows that they weren't. They'd hated each other, once upon a time. But now, she wishes nothing more than to go back to it.)_

_-/-/-/-/_

His wife runs a finger along the line of the scar and his nose twitches in reflex. The scar one of many, but it's the most noticeable. He'll never tell her where it's really from. Even Before, very few people had known, had remembered him without the scar. (_Before means his old life. His old life as a teacher and a warrior. Before the fires stained the skies red and orange. Before the smoke and ash coated the ruins of the buildings, the ground, the bodies on the floor.) _

The last person he'd told, he thinks, is That Man. The one whose name he refuses to remember because it would hurt too much. The one whose eyes curved with his lips in a smile. The one who had no concept of boundaries _(really, there had been no need to give him a key. He came in through the window half the time anyway)_ and who often fell asleep with a book open on his chest.

Most scars smooth out a bit with age. The skin become accustomed to the abrupt change to scar tissue and then there's a melding of the two into an odd texture. But his scar isn't like that. It's as rough as the day that he received it, all those years ago.

His wife will run her hands along he scars on his torso. She'll ask him about them and he'll smile and make up something. That one? Oh he'd been running with scissors as a child and tripped. The one that was splattered across his ribs? The stove had caught fire and he'd been sitting on the counter when it happened.

She doesn't know anything of the horrors that he's seen and done. Knows nothing of murder and betrayal and the inner demons that laugh at you from the shadows and your own reflection.

He likes it that way, but at the same time, he longs for the long-gone days_(The days that will never come back)_ when, on those nights when all of those of his generation had to get their minds away from the current crisis, would compare scars and stories. They didn't lie to each other (_much)_ and didn't hide anything._ (Most of them had seen each other naked at some point in time). _They embellish and exaggerate _(As is the nature of all story-telling)_ but everyone would call each other on it and laugh and toast to living through it all.

-/-/-/-/-/

He's a very friendly man, she thinks as she tends to her stall. He'd been friendly since he got to town—God, was it really seven years already?—and had given her a small smile as he asked for directions.

He wasn't the classical handsome of the fairy tales that she'd been told as a child, even if he had the coloring for it with blonde hair and blue eyes. His nose was a little too big, his eyes very wide. His skin was tanned, as though he'd spent much of his life out in the sun and there were those odd scars on his cheeks, the ones that he never gives anyone a straight answer as to the nature of them.

She asked him out once, to a ramen place that her friend ran. His eyes had lit up, just for a moment, before darkening. He'd shaken his head and said, "Thanks, but no thanks."

_(It's been seven years since he ate ramen. He tried it once, when he got here, but it tastes bitter and metallic and it doesn't feel right to eat it anymore)_

She watches a stranger pass her stall. He's dressed entirely in black—wasn't he hot in that? It was burning outside—and his hands were stuffed in his pockets. He turns back and holds up a faded, worn photograph.

"Have you seen this man?" He asks, voice a little hoarse. He's more beautiful than handsome, with high cheekbones and pale skin. His hair looks like the raven's feathers and his eyes are black mirrors.

She studies the photo and is surprised at what she sees. "Yes, I do! He lives in that apartment, there." She points a little ways down.

He bows his head once in thanks before folding the well-worn photo and slipping it back into his pocket.

It's as he's entering the building that the blonde comes out. _(He likes to go for a jog most mornings. The physical work is soothing and familiar)_

They stare at each other for a moment before the blonde says disbelievingly, "That you?" The brunette lifts his shoulders and lets them fall in a graceful shrug, but the blonde laughs and strides to him in a movement that's too graceful for the clumsy man she's come to know, too graceful for any human, really, and embraces him tightly.

When they finally break apart, there's a smile on the blonde's face that isn't familiar in any way, but it looks right on him. The brunette says something—it's too low for her to hear—and the smile widens.

"Still the same ass you always were, I see. C'mon, teme. Let's get some ramen."

"I'm not paying." The brunette warns.

The blonde slings an arm across his friend's shoulders. "Of course you're not."

Even as she watches them walk away, she thinks that they fit together. Not perfectly, no. The brunette is taller and like a dark shadow, where the blonde is a subtle light. But they fit together in the sense that neither of them fit into this world. They're a part of an entirely different puzzle, one long since forgotten and lost in the sands of time.

-/-/-/

"_Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true." _

_-Chairman__** (Memoirs of a Geisha)**_


End file.
